Abstract
In Evelina and The Simple Story, the long-dead mothers who ‘return’ in the body of their daughters have a spectral effect on the fathers beholding them. However, there is nothing spectral about the mothers in Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance and The Italian: they are found very much alive. When they return from the ‘dead’, they establish a new society in which the welfare of their children is secure. Although the Gothic operates in the register of the supernatural, the mother in these two novels is not ghostly. Yet through her figure, the fathers’ crimes return to haunt him.
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Notes
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© 2014 Eva König
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König, E. (2014). Introduction to Part IV. In: The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137382023_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137382023_20
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